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Owner manuals and installation guides contain far more information about a product than either the sales brochure, the online descriptions, or even Amazon reviews. The manual will have exact dimensions, all the parts, and caveats about what it can’t do. So my rule of thumb these days is to always download the product’s manual before I purchase the item. Impossible in the old preinternet days, it’s a no-brainer today. It has saved me many times. Regrettably, not 100% of products have PDFs that are findable, but the better products do. — KK

Recomendo is a weekly newsletter that gives you 6 brief personal recommendations of cool stuff.

Curated by Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder and Claudia Dawson, our goal is to give our readers a weekly list of 6 things we love — travel tips, books, TV shows, clothes, tools, websites, podcasts, and so on. We want people to be able to read the entire newsletter in 90 seconds or less, with no fluff or wheel spinning.